Distraction? Social media as a cathartic substitute for political engagement? In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam blames television and commuting for a large part of a loss of trust and participation in social organisations. Is Facebook displacing valuable social and political actions, rather than catalysing them?

Related, does social media’s excellence at bite-sized information mean that context, nuance and argument are now disadvantaged in a way they weren’t before?

Misinformation? Fake news, propaganda, weaponised hoaxes, the whole boatload of lies and half-truths. But surely this is not new. Something about the lack of transparency, and the ability to insert misinformation so it is transmitted along our social networks, the same kind of currency as news of their pets and holiday photos, adds a terrifying velocity to misinformation.

False consensus – creating the impression that something is universally viewed at true or important, when it isn’t. See also filter bubbles. Distinguished from echo chambers, but algorithmically curated blindness to counterpoints.

Erosion of common ground – loss of common knowledge and frames of reference. If we don’t know why other people believe what they believe, how can we start to engage them

Monopoly powers – facebook has 2 billion+ monthly users. That’s too much power for a single media entity to have without a truckload of regulatory oversight or democracy control.

Any evidence bearing on the factors I list? Any factors I missed? Comments are open!

Hi Tom,
I appreciate and share your measured attitude regarding the dangers of social media (I am doing some work on the topic). I am not sure I understand what you mean by “Erosion of common ground”. Could you please quickly elaborate or give some reference? That would be very helpful.
Thank you,
Alberto

I’ll try an alternate explanation. It has more to do with quantity (or “big data” if you like buzzwords) than with quality.

After WW2, politics slowly turned into yet another consumer good. Except that unlike most consumer goods, it endures even when the consumer is disappointed, which creates even more disappointment. The big ideologies have faded (hard to complain about that actually) and hence we are all looking for our personal gratification rather than some “higher good” (am I the only one who has trouble even imagining not using brackets when writing “higher good”?) And the world, or society for that matter not having our very own personal happiness as their ultimate goal and actually having no goal at all, we are angry. Why don’t I get what I evidently deserve, since I desire it? I will Brexit to express my discontent. I will Trump you snotty elites who do not give me my just deserts.

Facebook and other, related technologies have sped up the process and increased the effects of this pre-digital evolution, which is a big deal, but then again maybe not such a big deal. So in the end you are right, it’s not Facebook we should blame. It’s ourselves. And that’s not going to happen. We deserve to be happy, not blamed.

@Alberto – by common ground I mean the knowledge of what other people know. If we don’t agree on who is trustworthy, what constitutes the most important issues of the day, if we don’t even know what other people are being told, then it seems to me to remove the basic understanding required to have a discussion

@hubert – we could agree on this diagnosis, but facebook might still have some accelerating role. And, importantly, it could be changed to create different effects.

Facebook could be changed, of course. But what would that solve? The genie is already out of the bottle. Moreover Facebook (or rather its owners) did not set out to have Trump elected. They tinkered with their product to make it ever more commercially successful and that created a fragmented public space that turns out to reward demagoguery. If Facebook stopped doing this, I have no doubt that another company would jump in and do exactly the same, and probably do it even “better”. That is the nature of a marketplace.

Blaming Facebook is effectively pretending that we are dealing with a mere technical glitch. It conveniently swipes the very real downsides of liberal democracy under the carpet.

In the UK, where there are rules on political spending, there is also the issue of secret political spending – Facebook is hardly the only place that you could do that, but it is one, and possibly it is easier to be secret on it than on other advertising platforms.

In the US, political spending isn’t regulated anyway, so it doesn’t apply.

(Our rules are scarcely enforced. But there is still a big difference between having badly enforced rules and having no rules)

@Tom. Your description of our current situation seems accurate, “by common ground I mean the knowledge of what other people know. If we don’t agree on who is trustworthy, what constitutes the most important issues of the day, if we don’t even know what other people are being told, then it seems to me to remove the basic understanding required to have a discussion.” I’m not sure this is caused by FB (but rather accelerated) and caused by sound-byte media and overloaded schedules, and shrinking attention spans. I wonder what a survey of time spent research issues would reveal?